Matt Prokes

Alpha Edition!, e-mail spelling/grammer/topic suggestions to mattprokes@gmail.com

The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.3 Web Development Today
Page: #17

We will be using scite in conjunction with firefox development throughout this book. SciTE, is a wonderful little light weight text editor that I found a few years back. The great thing about it is that it supports about 40->50 programming languages and the total size of the app is under 600k.

You are by no means required to use it, but the book will be making use of it extensivly, similar products are TextPad, VI, and countless other text editors out there. This editor in particular has the lowest level learning curve, and overall I just prefer it.

Some of the features include, code completion (when the proper plugin is installed), refactoring tools which allow you to search code via regex, collapsable code blocks, this feature is very cool because it allows you to more easily keep track of where you are in the code, and also helps to identify the beginning and ending of a code block much more easy.

SciTEs’ tabbed environment, allows you to have multipule light weight tabs open, plus the syntax highlighting is visually easy on the eyes. One of the best parts about the editor is the ability to easily change the editor configuration, and the level of configuration options available. Finally, if you need to save a editor state for later on that can easily be done from the file menu “Save Session”.

To install it, simply go to the site and download the “Windows Executables” or “full download (830k)” which will be delivered in a zip file. Simply unzip the file, and look for a file named “SciTE”

If you are looking for yet an even more easy installation, download the windows installer, or the “An installer that includes extensions” link. The installer may also include features that are not in the zipped version, I have never tried the installable version so I am not for certain if that is the case. Anyway if y ou are looking for more information on using SciTE, the Professional Developer Series, volume reference page has a link to a more detailed SciTE tutorials that will give you a much better in-depth look at the editor.

You will also probably pick up SciTE tips and tricks throughout the book.

Tags: web developer 1.3

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